


and i am up and on my broken limbs

by proximally



Series: abandoned works [14]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen, Major Character Undeath, Spoilers for Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, T for swears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proximally/pseuds/proximally
Summary: Taako dies in Glamour Springs, but he's not giving up that easy.
Series: abandoned works [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981928
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	and i am up and on my broken limbs

**Author's Note:**

> title from the lyrics of Disaster Button by Snow Patrol.
> 
> originally written in october 2018.
> 
> if you'd like to take the concept and run with it, please feel free! i'd really appreciate this being linked back to though.

Sunlight filters across the wood floor through the cracks in the curtains, and studs the planks with diamonds. It plays across Taako’s face, dappled by his mussed golden hair, and reflects off his many earrings, scattering a rainbow across the caravan’s interior.

He yawns. Stretches. Lets out a small moan. He hasn’t felt this well-rested in...gods. Who knows? Maybe never. He’s warm and comfortable, and he feels….at peace. Yes, that’s it. He’s at peace.

He closes his eyes again. Who knows when he’ll get a chance like this again? And anyway, Sazed will wake him if he’s neede--

Sazed.

The show.

There was… the garlic chicken. The audience, forty strong - not a record turnout, but enough to make him proud. Enough to make him cocky. A kid, not five minutes after handouts, legs unsteady, clutching their stomach. Sazed, pushing him away, back to the caravan. 

He does not remember much more than this. Nothing he particularly _wants_ to remember, anyway.

Taako stands up. His body does not. 

It’s about as much as he expected.

* * *

Taako does not go gentle into that good night. He is aware that this is frowned upon in many planes of existence; honestly, if he had a copper for every time Lup and Barry had been hunted down by some sort of death god, or death-adjacent entity, well...he’d have, like, 7 coppers. Listen, it’s happened often enough.

Speaking of, he really doesn’t appreciate that this information has been inaccessible to him for six years. 

_Six._

_Fucking._

_Years._

Gods, what even happened? No static lingers, but the line between Taako, one half of the Starblaster’s Chefs and Arcane Specialists and Taako, of Sizzlin’ It Up! fame remains blurred into obscurity. With memory, too, comes the realisation that something here is deeply, desperately wrong. This is his ninth death, and so far it’s gone like exactly none of the eight previous ones, point the first being that he’s aware of being dead. Up until now, the events have been pretty routinely a brief or unbrief moment of pain, and then opening his eyes to see the deck of the Starblaster. They’re pretty sure it’s something to do with the bond engine; it’s something Lup and Barry had to design the lichification ritual around.

So, to list his problems: 

  1. Something happened to Lup. Gone six years without a word. There’s a lot of options out there - the best being she ended up like him, alive but wandering, divorced from memory - but he has a feeling that’s a slim chance, if any.
  2. Something has happened to the Starblaster’s bond engine. 
  3. Something erased half his memory and de-Luped the rest. If there’s anything to learn from this situation, it’s that it doesn’t seem to affect the ex-living.
  4. He has no idea where the rest of the crew is. 
  5. He is super duper dead.



And despite all that, assuming everyone else has been mindwiped, he might be the only one aware enough of the situation to change it.

Except… except he’d murdered Barry, hadn’t he? It’s not something he likes to dwell on. Up until literally just now he’d written it off as some kind of awful fever dream. But-- Barry's gotta be out there, somewhere. He'll know more about their current state of affairs, for sure.

(He has to.)

Before that, though, Taako's gonna need to do something about the whole 'super dead' thing. He has several options, which is more than most dead people get so frankly he shouldn't feel so bummed about it. He's no necromancer, but he's lived around Barold long enough to pick up some tricks.

So. Zombie? Off the table. Has the pro of keeping his body and being honestly pretty durable, but at the cost of gradually diminishing cognition, regardless of how well you perform the steps. _That_ is not something Taako wants.

Revenant...is viable. Provided he's angry enough (and dear gods, has he ever been this fucking pissed? Whoever did is going to _pay,_ this he knows) he'll keep both body and mind. The downside, though, is he gets a year to complete the revenge, and then he's stuffed. And also he's not totally sure if it counts if whoever did this wasn't directly involved in his death, which would be hard anyway considering it's his own damn stupid fault.

He _could_ just remain a ghost. But then he's stuck haunting this caravan and waiting until some unlucky fuck happens to wander past and fail the save against his possession, and anyway that just doesn't quite sit right with him.

Gods. This is such a fucking mess. Revenant...revenant seems like the only real option. He'll be on a time crunch, but hey, it'll be just like another day at the office! Except he's alone, dead, and has no idea where to even begin. Well. No matter. He's Taako, and he's a baller wizard, regardless of the events of the last six years, and by _gods_ he's gonna find his family and then murder the shit outta whoever dared take them from him.

**Author's Note:**

> i had plans to turn this into a small series exploring what might happen if any one of the seven birds had died before the canon era! in taako's chapter the canon timeline gets entirely thrown out the window due to taako's deadline, including helping out magnus with raven's roost (julia lives!!!!). also the fun joke of kravitz being specifically after barry and not taako (though hes on THIN fuckin ice for hanging out w this lich) bc revenants are legal undead in the queen's eyes. (i think it's very valid to get revenge after you've been cruelly murdered, especially if you're only allowed a year.)
> 
> in magnus' chapter, magnus would've died with julia in raven's roost, realised what was coming, and struck a deal with kravitz and the raven queen to stop the end of the universe - him & julia would've gone with kravitz to lucas miller's lab and-- i didn't have any notes past that. f. merle's chapter would've involved dying in a pre-campaign adventure and getting plucked out of the astral plane by pan.


End file.
